“Promoting [Birth Control] Among Workers and Peasants” – Reading Population from the Peiping Morning Post in the Early 1930s

In this thesis, I examine how the discourse of population and birth control changed through the newspaper Population Supplement (renkou fukan人口副刊) under the then Beiping newspaper, the Peiping Morning Post (Beiping chenbao 北平晨報) from 1932-1936. My work highlights the two registers in the Supplement: The highbrow discourses by dominantly Chinese sociologists on linking population/overpopulation to the issues of national strengthening and nation crisis, and the letters from the Beiping urban residents (selected by the editors of the Supplement) asking for advice on contraceptive and birth control advice. I argue that there existed a disjuncture between these two registers, as the PS form presented a curated vision of Chinese society, only to be undermined by the residents’ pragmatic demands of birth control and contraceptive advice and tools.